"My generation grew up with a collective imagination, not only inherited from the Apollo missions, but also seen in the phantasmagoric images of Japanese cartoons. Names that have become as familiar to us as those of real friends, such as Captain Harlock, Captain Future , who lived their adventures in an attainable, immediate, inhabited space. Probably that space of the Japanese imaginary that then moved to transmissions with people in flesh and blood like Star Trek or Space 1999, conditioned an entire generation that saw space like a home to be reached, a place to live and a land to explore ".
Esa astronaut Luca Parmitano's journey into space began like this, in front of the small screen, to the point of really "walking" around the Earth.
He tells it himself, choosing and commenting - between science, science fiction and literature - the schedule of the "Domenica Con", curated by Enrico Salvatori and Giovanni Paolo Fontana, broadcast on Sunday 11 April from 14 to 24 on Rai Storia.
A date chosen not by chance: sixty years ago, on April 12, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space: "A hero who belongs to all humanity - says Parmitano - but probably if Gagarin could see today what has been made in the last 60 years would not believe his eyes. An evolution that is not only scientific, but also technological and human, because today's astronauts are very different from Gagarin's selection ".
The Italian astronaut - for the first time in space in 2013, then in command of the International Space Station, in 2019 - opens the program by recalling the Russian cosmonaut with a 1981 "Quark" in which Piero Angela also interviews Isaac Asimov, one of the fathers of science fiction, and continues the journey commenting Specials and documentaries on astronauts and scientists, on "training" for the cosmos, on the race between the USA and the USSR, without forgetting Apollo 11, perhaps the best known mission in space, the first to bring man to the moon.
After having remembered the Japanese science fiction "anime" and proposed a classic like "Space 1999", in prime time here is the documentary "Bajkonur, Terra" dedicated to the base in Kazakhstan from which Parmitano himself left in 2013 towards the Space Station.
To seal the schedule, a rare interview with the British science fiction author and inventor Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (author of "2001 - A Space Odyssey") and "The journey of Astolfo", reinterpreted by Bernardino Zapponi in 1971. It is the an opportunity to see two greats again: Gigi Proietti in the role of the paladin Astolfo, and Renato Rascel in those of a delightful "Pierrot lunaire".
"Where is the line between fantasy, fantastic, science fiction, science?" Parmitano asks himself.
"Sometimes it is difficult to understand this boundary. If we think of authors like Asimov, like Jules Verne, and if we go back in time, much further back, even our Ariosto dedicated part of his production to the fantastic, to what today would be called science fiction, even before it existed ".
(HANDLE).